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Roasted banana pudding s’mores trifle

One of my favorite things in the world is a s’more. I love how the chocolate melts into the gooey marshmallow, swirling together between a crunchy graham cracker sandwich. And if there is a crispy, smoky campfire char on the marshmallow? I’m in heaven.
I tend to eat these periodically throughout the year, although I make them with the use of my microwave. A couple of weeks ago I was eating one as a snack while Zoë ate a banana. She’s always likes to share her food. And by share I mean insistently shoving whatever she’s eating in your face while saying, Bite?, until you take a bite of what she has. So I took a bite, along with a bite of s’more, and it was really delicious!

So the wheels in my head started turning. What if I made some kind of s’more bar topped with one of my other favorite things, banana pudding? I got even more excited when my friend, Rashmi, suggested brûléeing the marshmallow creme I was thinking about putting on top. So I gathered my recipes and made a plan. I had made cupcakes before which had a graham cracker crust on the bottom, so I figured I could do the same thing here and it would serve as the graham cracker component of a s’more. Next, I would bake a brownie layer on top to serve as the chocolate component. I decided on a roasted banana pudding recipe to go next. Finally, I would try to concoct some type of marshmallow whipped cream that I could char under the boiler. Once they were all put together and refrigerated, they would meld into an epic campfire meets potluck treat!

You know how I promised I would blog about my culinary failures? This is one of them. Now, when I say failure, I don’t mean that it didn’t taste good. (Ahem, Mike’s co-workers who will be eating this tomorrow, ahem.) It just didn’t turn out at all how I imagined it would. The roasted banana pudding turned out well. Although, I must say, given the amount of gelatinous liquid that came out when I opened the skins, I feel like I know what it’s like to give a banana a C section now.

The graham cracker crust didn’t come together. At all. I thought it had. I crushed the graham crackers, added some sugar, and then kept adding melted butter until the mixture would stick to itself and press down into the bottom of the pan. But once I baked it off, it just became a crumbly mess. The brownies came together just fine; I had’t realized until after I started making the recipe that it was for an 8×8 pan. No problem, I thought. I’ll just spread the batter out and bake it for less time. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t really spread out over the graham crackers without taking the crumbs with it.

At this point, I decided to see if the pudding and brownie mess even tasted okay together before I bothered going further. They were alright together, but didn’t give me the s’more taste I was hoping for. So I decided to pack away the treats separately and go back to the drawing board.

Then I thought, Wait a minute! I can just do what the British do. I’ll just throw it all together and call it trifle! So I placed brownie squares on the bottom, followed by the banana pudding, and then the graham cracker crumbs that didn’t stick to the brownies. After repeating two more layers, I placed a layer of mini marshmallows on top that had been broiled for a minute.

So, it kind of works and it kind of doesn’t. All the components taste fine, but they don’t entirely meld together as a trifle. It definitely didn’t make me feel like I was eating a s’more with a banana. Mike wasn’t a huge fan, but that’s because he doesn’t like banana pudding. I have no idea how I married someone with such a tragic flaw!

ETA: Letting it sit overnight did wonders. It was so much better today. Still not s’more like, but pretty damn tasty.